This interview
was conducted with Rob Brand at WWU Libraries Special Collections, in
Bellingham, Washington, on October 7th and
October 17th, 2005. The interviewer is Tamara
Belts.

TB: Today is Friday, October 7th,
2005, and I (Tamara Belts) am here with Rob Brand. We’re
about to do an oral history as part of the Campus School Memories
Project. The first question is: How did you happen to attend
the Campus School?

RB: I grew up on the backside of
Sehome Hill on Liberty Street, so in effect the Campus School was the
elementary school in Bellingham closest to where we lived.
The next closest one would be Franklin School, but I think that the
Campus School was recognized as being on the cutting edge in terms of
what they were doing educationally at the time. I had an aunt
who was a teacher in the Bellingham School District, so she had a
pretty good handle on what was being done in the public schools and
what was being done at the Campus School. I’m sure
there was some influence there to encourage my parents to enroll
me. My understanding is that at that time you had to get on a
waiting list and everybody who applied did not get into the Campus
School. What their criteria was, I’m not sure, but
I started here in Kindergarten. It would have been September
of 1942, and I stayed here until June of 1950, through the
seventh-grade. At that time, when I was going to school,
there was a junior high school as well, but it was discontinued in 1950
when a lot of men were coming back from the Korean War and going to
school on the G.I. Bill. They needed the space. The
junior high school classrooms were located in Old Main.

TB: Did anyone else in
your family attend the Campus School?

RB: My older sister attended the
Campus School; she was two years older than me, and attended through
the ninth grade.

TB: And what was her name?

RB: Her name was Andra Lee Brand,
and is now Andra Lee Phibbs.

TB: What were the years and grades
of your attendance? I think you might have already answered
this.

RB: I started
Kindergarten in the fall of 1942 and went all the way through grade
six. The Campus School was located in what is now Miller
Hall. I then attended seventh-grade in the junior high school
which was in Old Main, and that would have been until the end of the
school year in 1950. When the junior high school closed,
there were two classes then that were displaced. The
ninth-graders of course, and that was my sister’s class, went
to Bellingham High School, the seventh and eighth graders were to go to
either Fairhaven or Whatcom. There were probably, I would
guess, about 50 to 55 of us and all but one went to
Fairhaven. The one that went to Whatcom was Robbie Calhoun,
whose father was the minister at the Congregational Church.
He lived probably about two or three blocks from Whatcom, so, it was,
for him, a natural move. Then, of course, we reconnected when
we got to Bellingham High School.

TB: Great. O.K, did you
pay any fees?

RB: I don’t know
the answer to that. I don’t know if there was a fee
charged. If there was, I knew nothing about it.

TB: Where did you live?
Actually, you’ve already answered this.

RB: Well, yes I have, in a
way. When I started in the Kindergarten we lived on Liberty
Street, 824 Liberty Street, which at that time was the last block on
Liberty Street going up Sehome Hill. Then, when I was in
probably third or fourth grade, and I cannot remember exactly which
year, we moved across the alley to Mason Street, to 823 Mason
Street. I know that I lived on Mason Street when I was in
fourth, fifth, sixth and all the way then through high school and beyond

TB: How did you get to and from
school?

RB: In the early years, and by
early years I mean probably Kindergarten through grade three we
walked. We would walk along Myrtle Street to Jersey Street
and then we came to what we called the Jersey Street Trail, which went
across Sehome Hill, facing the water. You could look out and
see Georgia Pacific, the bay and most of the city. The trail emptied
out at Edens Hall. Then we would cut under the little archway
at Edens Hall where the maintenance crew kept their lawnmowers and
other tools, then walk to the elementary school.

TB: And do you
have any favorite memories of this experience?

RB: Of getting to school?
Well, I remember when we were little kids, the older kids would take us
in tow. So, there was my sister and another girl we picked up
on Key Street. There was a boy who lived next door to us that
was one year ahead of me, so there were about six of us.
Then, we’d pick up my best friend who at that time lived on
Key Street, too. So, the early days, we walked. The
older kids looked out for the younger ones. After me, there
were probably a couple of younger ones that would tag along with us for
a time.

When
I got to fourth or fifth-grade, and I can’t remember exactly
which one, we rode our bikes. My best friend, Pete Gaasland
and me (and we’ll talk about that when we get to that
section), rode our bikes. He grew up on Key Street and we
were the best of friends. We were in the same cribs together
when babies and went through school together at the Campus School,
Fairhaven, Bellingham High School, and UW for a time. He grew
up on Key Street and then he moved to Jersey Street. He and I
both had old bicycles that we would ride across the Jersey Street
Trail.

Now,
the reason we did that is that sports were very important to both of
us. So, after lunch, the race was to get out to the play
areas on the campus. Right now, where the Humanities Building
and Red Square are located was all open space, so we could play
football in the fall or we could shoot baskets or play
baseball. If you ate at the school, you couldn’t be
dismissed until everybody had finished. We learned that if we
rode our bikes home and ate our lunches really quickly and got on our
bikes and got back, we would be the first ones out there.
We’d be first up in baseball, or captains to choose the
teams. That’s what we did, and we rode those bikes
forever.

In
Bellingham in those days, that’s what people did. I
mean, we rode our bikes over to Downer Field and Battersby Field over
by Whatcom for the summer baseball programs. You could ride
your bikes everywhere. Of course it was nothing like
Bellingham is today. All the people who grew up here, we
liked those good old days.

TB: You said this, but maybe
elaborate, what did you do for lunch?

RB: Well, in the early grades,
Kindergarten, first, second, third, I’m sure that I ate lunch
in the school cafeteria. But I think we packed a lunch from
home. I don’t remember eating school
lunches. I still have the lunch pail that I carried to school
when I was in Kindergarten. When they had the reunion in
1993, I took the lunch pail with me to carry that around. It
was my memorabilia piece. The lunchroom was located on the
second floor of what is now Miller Hall, so it would be located
probably, where the psychology, counseling offices are now.
That would be the old third-grade classroom and like everything else it
is all office space now.

Miller
Hall, of course, has been chopped up forever. I mean, if
people came back that hadn’t been there since grade school,
about the only thing they’d recognize would be the ramps
leading to the second floor and down into the lower level.

What
I remember about the cafeteria was not the food, I remember they had
nice tables; they were not like you see in school cafeterias
today. Campus School was pretty unique in a lot of
respects. There was a dumbwaiter that carried things from the
main floor to the second floor, like the cartons of milk.
That was a biggy. Most of the kids ate lunch there because a
lot of them didn’t live as close to the school as I did
(though a lot of them did). There were kids who lived just
down 21st Street, in houses that are of course,
no longer there. And a fair number lived down Garden, 15th
Street, places like that, and most didn’t go home for
lunch.

TB: So the cooking part of
the cafeteria was actually on the floor below?

RB: I think it was. But
that part I really do not remember and it’s probably because
I never really ate the hot lunches. Now, when we got to the
junior high school, again, I continued to go home for lunch when in the
seventh-grade. But the people that ate here on the campus ate
lunch in the dining hall at Edens Hall, which was on the main floor of
Edens Hall, so there were junior high school students, but also college
students in the lunchroom at the same time.

RB: Well, what I can tell you is
kind of interesting. Bellingham in those days had one high
school. Many kids lived here and stayed here. We
had our fiftieth high school reunion in September and at the reunion
they always say, “O.K, all those people who went to
Birchwood School gather for a group picture, all that went to
Washington School…, the Campus School…”
We always have more people there than anybody else. We had
seventeen people there and fourteen of them had been in the
Kindergarten class that I attended.

TB: Oh, wow.

RB: Pretty amazing.

TB: Yes.

RB: So, the Kindergarten class,
I’m guessing probably had about twenty-five, twenty-six
students, because I think they limited the enrollment. They
put a lid on the number of students they would have. Probably
more than half of the kids that I went to Kindergarten with were at the
50th high school reunion.

TB: Wow. Who were your
favorite or most influential teachers?

RB: Well, the teacher that was
everybody’s favorite (there’s a difference between
favorite and most influential probably), would be Miss
Kinsman. Everybody looked forward to Miss Kinsman.
She was a third-grade teacher for me. The class ahead of us,
everybody thought got really lucky, because when they got to the
fifth-grade, Miss Kinsman moved to fifth-grade, so they got her
twice. When I got to the fifth-grade, though, she
wasn’t doing fifth-grade anymore. Her classroom was
upstairs. It was the first year that we got to walk up the ramp to the
second floor, other than lunchroom if you did the lunchroom
thing. But she was wonderful, everybody loved her.
It’s interesting. I can remember all of my teachers
except for fifth-grade. I draw a blank on that one.
We had Miss Nicol in Kindergarten, Miss Casanova in first-grade, I can
tell you an interesting story about that, if you would like to hear it.

TB: Yes.

RB: Miss Elliot in second-grade,
and she was old school. She was strict. Miss
Kinsman in third-grade, Miss Merriman in fourth-grade,
fifth-grade… In sixth-grade we had Miss McLeod and
in seventh-grade we had Miss Hunt. The eighth-grade teacher
was Frank Punches, whose son was a year ahead of me in school.
I still communicate with him. The ninth-grade
teacher was Jean Shephard. So, Miss Kinsman, definitely, left
her mark on all of us. I mean, she was everybody’s
favorite.

In
terms of being influential, I think Miss McLeod, probably, my
sixth-grade teacher. I was very interested in sports and
journalism. She let a couple of us develop our own school
newspaper. We wrote articles about Seattle Rainiers baseball
and in school things. We’d listen to the games and
score the games. That was probably when my journalism
interests were tapped. When I got to Fairhaven, I worked on
the school newspaper, when I was in high school I was the sports editor
of the paper. When I started out at the UW, my major was
journalism. That disappeared for a variety of reasons that we
probably won’t go into at this point in time.

TB: Do you remember any
of your student teachers?

RB: Well, I looked at that one and
that’s a tough one. We had a lot of student
teachers because the Campus School was the place where student teachers
did their training. It was a lab school and I think probably
in those days, at least at the elementary level, I’m guessing
that not very many people did their student teaching in the public
schools. I think they were pretty much held on
campus. The one that I do remember would have been fourth or
fifth-grade, and I’m thinking fifth-grade, would be Stew Van
Wingerden. Then Stewart later became a professor at Western.

It
was kind of interesting, when I was principal at Roosevelt School, this
would have been back in 1978, Stew was supervising the student teachers
we had and asked if we would do a mock interview for the
interns. We had about seven or eight student teachers at that
time and we did. I did that, along with a couple of other
principals from 1978 until 2004, doing one every quarter, for
prospective teachers.

When
I retired from the public schools in 1993 I then worked part-time at
WWU, supervising students who were training to be teachers in a variety
of capacities. When the elementary department reconfigured
this program in 2005, several positions were eliminated or incorporated
within other classes, thus marking the conclusion of my involvement
with the mock interview process. This activity is still
available in twice a year sessions developed and hosted by the Career
Planning and Placement Center as part of their job search assistance
for graduating interns.

I
remember teaching a number of summers in the admin department up here,
working with people that thought they wanted to be school
administrators, curriculum directors, whatever. So, it might
have been my first summer up here, and I was teaching a class that had
33 or 34 students, most of them from British Columbia, because most of
the admin students in those days came from Canada. Stew had a
seminar group and he asked me, “Would I be willing
to come and talk with them?” I said,
“Sure,” and so I did.
He had three students. Now, here’s an experienced
instructor, right, with three students, and here I am with 33 trying to
figure out what I’m doing. We joked about that
experience. Great individual, great man and he was a great
part of the faculty up here for a long time.

My
sister, remember, was two years ahead of me. In her
ninth-grade year, two of her student teachers were Jim Roberts and Dick
Green. Jim Roberts later became the superintendent of schools
in Bellingham, so he was my boss, and Dick Green was the assistant
superintendent, and he was my immediate supervisor when I was a
principal for a number of years. I didn’t know them
at that time when they were student teaching, but that’s a
connection that we all have.

Interestingly
enough, the Bellingham School District, back in those days, when people
graduated from Western, here’s Jim Roberts, who later became
superintendent, right? He couldn’t get a job in
Bellingham when he got out of Western because Bellingham would not hire
inexperienced teachers. They made people go somewhere else
and let somebody else train them and then they would hire
them. I know Jim went to Ferndale, I started my career in Oak
Harbor, and my wife started in Sedro Woolley; that’s kind of
the way it was in Bellingham in those days.

RB: Well, in elementary school I
loved all the classes. I liked arithmetic. When I
got to high school and had to do mathematics that changed. I was more a
literacy/social studies kind of a person than math/science.
But I liked them all. Obviously, we had a lot of special kind
of activities, a lot of special things that we got to do that kids in
the public schools did not.

We
got to go to the college pool and swim every Friday, so
that’s where I learned to swim. Am I a great
swimmer? No. I think we looked more forward to the
end of when they did the teaching, so we could have free time and dive
off the board and have free play time. The Campus School
itself did not have a library. So, when it was library time
we came over here into this room (Special Collections, Wilson 279) and
the librarian at that time, whoever that was, did typically what
librarians do, there would be a story time and then you would have time
to check out books. I don’t remember much about the
early years, I remember when I got up into fifth and sixth-grade that
John R. Tunis became a favorite author of mine. I read Iron
Duke I don’t know how many
times. I remember it was on a shelf back here on this corner
in this library when I came, that was pretty special.

All
of the classrooms, at least in the lower grades, had a room that was a
classroom and they also had another room that was connected to
it. It was kind of a workroom area. They had
benches and vices and woodworking materials. You got to do a
lot of things. We made boats and we did this and
that. We had some very special kinds of things going for
us. The building itself, if you went down in the lower level,
not the main floor, but even down lower than that, those ramps on the
east end of Miller Hall. There were three gymnasiums and one
of them was exclusively for Kindergarten. It had huge blocks,
climbing apparatus, etc. Then the other two were regular
gymnasiums. Most of the P.E. that we had was taught by
student teachers, not by the regular classroom teachers.

TB: Going back to that extra room;
when you used that extra room to do whatever kind of creative
activities, was that a special class or for when you finished your
class assignment? For example, if you finished your math
assignment could you go work in that room?

RB: Yes, I’m sure
there was a combination of the two. I think there were times
when it was a classroom activity: we’re all going whether you
want to or not. But, I think there were times when you could
go in there if you had some free time and do some of those kinds of
activities.

TB: Did you use regular
textbooks or other kinds of learning materials?

RB: I thought about that
one. I can’t remember things like science and
social studies. I know that we did a lot of hands-on kinds of
science things. You have to understand now, the teachers,
didn’t have to plan for everything because the student
teachers were the ones that primarily taught the science.
They did science or social studies and other core subjects, so it was a
great learning opportunity for them.

I
work with teachers in the schools today, and recognize the pressure of
WASL and other high stakes testing. For teachers today,
literacy is number one, math is number two, and if they have time for
other curricular areas, maybe it’s there. For
years, I always felt that the most ignored program in elementary
schools was science. Well, that will change, because now,
they have a science WASL, too, which will be done not by fourth-graders
but by fifth-graders.

Reading,
yes; “See Spot run, see Dick, see Jane.”
We learned to read in the Dick and Jane books. People
complained later and many of the complaints had to do with gender
issues. I mean, the dad of the home came home after work,
suit and tie; mom stayed home with the apron and had the cookies and
milk on the table. (I’ll tell you a story about my
mother about that in a second, if you’d like to hear
it.) Then they had the two children, a boy and a girl, and
they had Spot, pretty unrealistic setting in 2005. So the
main complaint related not about whether you could teach kids to read
with texts like that, because you can. (A good teacher can
teach kids to read with anything. You take a good teacher and
give them a room that has nothing and they’ll teach and make
magic happen. You take a teacher that’s less than
effective and give them all the bells and whistles and it’s
still not going to work).

The
story about my mother was when I was in fourth or fifth-grade, and I do
not remember the year she had to go to work. That would have
been probably about 1947. Very unusual; I think in my class
she might have been the only mother that was working. She
worried about that forever. Is this going to be the
end of Rob? You know, that he’ll never
survive without mom being at home. I was able to convince her
I would. So what she did before going to work (either her or
my dad, probably my dad), made the lunch. When I came home on
the bike I would dump it. (We had two empty lots below us where we
played football and baseball; we played basketball at my
friend’s house one street over because he had a better set up
for that). Ride home, dump the bike, run up, eat the lunch in
about one minute, run down, get on the bike and disappear. I
always told her, “You know, mom, if you’d
been home, I’d see you for about two minutes, just long
enough to grab the sandwich and be out of here.”
Then after school, like I said we had these empty lots, so in the fall
of the year we’d play football there, a few of us in the
neighborhood. Another thing that’s changed, in
those days we got together and organized ourselves. We
didn’t have to have somebody gather us together, blow the
whistle, and coach us. Winter time, we went to my
friend’s house over on Key Street and shot baskets every
night after school until dark. In baseball season we came
back to my empty lot because that was better suited for
baseball. Then we’d play out until dark, until
somebody called and said it was dinner time. That was just
kind of the way it went.

TB: What kind of grading
system was in use during your attendance?

RB: You know, I don’t
know. I think probably, somewhere in the family archives,
there’s a copy; I think it was a narrative that was written
by the teacher. That’s my sense. I can
double check or I can ask my sister. She would probably know
the answer better than I would. But I think that that was the
standard procedure.

TB: Do you especially remember any
creative activities such as weaving, making things, etc.?

RB: I don’t
remember specific ones. We did a lot of different kinds of
things. We did the pot holders, the typical kinds of
things. One that I remember, this would have been upper
grades, fifth or sixth grade, led again by a student teacher.
We had pieces of copper that were probably about the size of this pad,
maybe a little bit larger. Then with a stick tool you could
make impressions on them. I remember making a deer head as I
recall, then we’d put frames around them. So, yes,
we had access to those kinds of things that you would probably not find
in the public schools for different kinds of art activities.

Arts
and craftsy kinds of things were never my favorite. I
remember when I transferred from the UW up here and had to take an art
class, it was the one that was required for prospective teachers, that
was a challenge for me.

TB: What were your
classes like? Were there a lot of student teachers observing
and/or teaching lessons or parts of lessons?

RB: Yes, I remember student
teachers doing a lot. You could break the class down and do
different kinds of group activities. In the elementary
schools the interns probably did most of the social studies.
They had to develop units of study, science units, etc. I
remember in seventh-grade that whoever the student teachers were took
on the task of developing a play. The Campus School at that time had an
auditorium and a stage. The room is still there,
it’s a large lecture hall now, and I think it’s 164
on the main floor. When I was in seventh-grade they split
seventh and eighth-graders into two different groups and each group did
one play. The group that I was in did The Taming of
the Shrew. I played the part of Petruchio in that
play. There were two different casts, so I played Petrucio in
one of them and John Green played Petruchio in the other
cast. It was great. It was a great
experience. I’m sure the reason I was selected is
that I had the ability to memorize things. I was, believe you
me, not a great actor and Hollywood didn’t come around
knocking on my door, but I was able to remember the lines, which I
guess was worth something.

TB: A question I don’t
think is on here, but it came out in other ones, did you learn to
handle the student teachers?

RB: I think we were pretty
good. You mean handle in terms of test them out and things
like that? I don’t remember doing stuff like
that. I remember doing stuff like that with substitute
teachers by the time we were in junior high school and high school, but
while I was at the Campus School, I don’t ever remember doing
anything purposely.

I
do remember though, when I was going to Western (in those days Western
primarily was a place to train teachers. We’re
talking about 1957, 1958. They had business courses, but my
good friend who took them couldn’t finish up here, he had to
go back to the UW. They offered general business and things
like that, but not marketing, accounting and some of those kinds of
things. So he had to go back to the U to finish up down
there). I know of students who did observations in the Campus
School and they would go around when kids were working on the easel and
look and make comments and students would say, “No,
here’s the questions you’re supposed to be asking,”
because they had had so many. They were very savvy about
that. And I think that became more of a factor later
on.

Somebody
asked me recently about how the Campus School changed, because it
did. I know the focus of what they were doing changed after
we were gone, but I don’t know to what degree. I
know there were a lot more observations and things like that.

See
these kids I work with, they get a practicum, they’re in a
practicum right now, in their second quarter.
They’ll have one in science, they’ll have one on
math depending on the instructor, they have one in literacy, so by the
time they go to student teach, they’ve had a fair amount of
experience out in the public schools.

When
I went through the program, we visited the second-grade classroom as a
class, like a Psych 455 class or something, just to go and observe a
lesson for about 30 minutes. That’s the
[first]-grade story that I was going to relate to you.
That’s the only thing. We didn’t go there
and stay or help a teacher or anything like that, so when I did my
first student teaching, in those days we did two, you did a half a day,
like in my case I did a half day at the elementary because I thought I
wanted to teach secondary and then we did all day in the secondary
schools, so when I went to Franklin school and did student teaching in
third-grade, that was really, for all intents and purposes my first
time in a public school since I’d been in the Campus
School.

But
the [first]-grade visit was quite interesting. Miss Casanova
was still the [first]-grade teacher. They were doing some
kind of study or unit about the farm. I don’t know
if they took a field trip to the farm or not (which is pretty standard,
all the Bellingham schools do that). She was doing this
lesson and she had a chicken on her lap. She was talking and
I don’t know what about, but what struck me was that she did
the same thing when I was in [first]-grade. So in
[first]-grade I probably would have been about [six] years old, and now
I’m probably about 20, 21. The lesson to my
recollection was identical and I wouldn’t be surprised if it
was the same chicken for that matter, either. That one
certainly stuck with me.

TB: Wow. Did you attend
summer school at the Campus School and if so, why?

RB: Did not. I
don’t ever remember going to a summer school
session. I might have, but I don’t remember doing
it.

TB: What extra-curricular
activities did you engage in? What did you do at recess,
lunchtime? What did you enjoy the most? And what
games did you play?

RB: Well, several of us were really
into sports things, so recess time that’s what we did; we
played sports. You have to understand that out where Red
Square is there was a board walk that went from the main entrance of
the Campus School over toward the library, dividing that whole area
into two expansive playgrounds, play fields if you will.
We’d go out and organize our own games depending on the
season. Basketball was a little tougher because at recess
time, they wouldn’t let us go into the gym
unsupervised. There were no basketball hoops outside, so at
that particular time, I don’t know what we did. I
do remember that bombardment was a favorite PE time game.

In
the seventh-grade we organized tackle football games on the playground
and a lot of the college students would stay around and watch us
play. We thought we were pretty good. We had
sophisticated plays, double reverses, etc. One of my
classmates was Chuck Lappenbusch; his dad was the football coach at
Western for years. We’d go to all of the Western
games; we’d go to their turnouts and watch them practice, and
we knew all the players.

An
interesting side story to that is that one of my fellow students, and
he shall remain nameless at this time, was in line to get a drink at
one of the drinking fountains. You know how the kids line up
and as he bent over to get the drink, somebody bumped him and he
chipped his tooth. When he went home his mother said,
“Well, how’d that happen?”
He said, “Playing football,”
which was not true. But the upshot of it was they made us
quit playing tackle football. We had been doing this without
pads. It was like rugby is now and it was rough and
tumble. We were not pleased! We were not pleased with that
decision but I guess that you adjust and move on

You
talk about other activities or other things that we did. As I
think back, I know the buildings that were here were the Campus School,
Edens Hall, Old Main, the library, old Carver gym and I think that was
about it. College Hall was built and back then it was a
Men’s Residence Hall. At the time where the
bookstore is now, were houses and a lot of the students lived in those
houses at that particular time. The track was located not far
from where the original Carver gym was, down in the hole down there,
probably where SMATE is today.

We
had student teachers that were interested in sports as well, so we
would go over there and set up track meets. We’d
set up our own track meets. We’d come back on the
weekend and if they’d leave the high jump, standards out,
we’d do our own thing on the weekends. So there was
a lot that we were able to do even when school was not in
session. But a lot of what we did revolved around sports
games.

TB: Did you visit the college
itself? The college library you mentioned, [but you did you]
attend assemblies or sporting events or anything else at the college
when you were in the Campus School?

RB: Yes, of course we came to the
library, but primarily to come to the children’s library
which was located right here. There was another building that
I didn’t mention. It was a woodworking building,
and located in what is now the parking lot to the east of Miller
Hall. It was primarily the shop where they did maintenance
tasks, but I can remember in seventh-grade we went to the shop and
there was a shop teacher. He later taught in the Bellingham
schools, so I’m guessing he might have been a student teacher
at that time. His name was Ian Monson. I remember
doing woodworking and mechanical drawing in that building.

It’s
kind of ironic. My father’s original occupation was
carpentry and then he lost the sight of one eye and could no longer do
that. The carpentry gene pool did not trickle down.
I can remember at Fairhaven we had to do woodshop one year and metal
shop another year. The worst grades I got in junior high
school were in shop classes.

We
went to all the sporting events. We’d go to the
college games, basketball games over in old Carver gym.
We’d go to the football games, which of course, were held at
Battersby Field on the other side of town. Western had a
great football team in 1950, that would have been my seventh-grade
year, so we knew a lot of the people and some of the guys on the team
became student teachers and later went into the teaching
profession. Basketball games I can remember some of
them. The gym would be absolutely packed; those were the days
when it was Eastern Washington, Central Washington, and Western
Washington. They played Seattle U, and back in the late
Forties-early Fifties, [they] had the O’Brien twins, Johnny
and Eddie O’Brien. They’re a legend at
Seattle University. They later both played professional
baseball, so when they came up here and played the gym was just
absolutely jam-packed. I remember we sat on the floor, right
by the line that marked the outside part of the gym floor. It
was fun, and we felt like we were really a part of it.

When
we were in the junior high school, when we would go home after school,
the basement floor, as you would walk down toward what is now the
Career Planning and Placement Center; about halfway down  was the
bookstore. (And it was even the bookstore when I transferred
from the UW in 1957). You’d go there and buy your
books, snacks, etc. We’d always stop there to buy
an ice cream bar on our way home after our basketball turn
out. The campus school in the junior high school was really
very interesting. The classrooms I think must have been on
the second floor, so we had the seventh-grade, eighth-grade;
ninth-grade was in a different corner. Then there was an
empty room that became kind of a canteen, where the student council met
and kids could go there at noon time as a social time. It
would be like the commons you would find in schools now, but not a real
common occurrence in any public school, certainly in those
days. It was an informal gathering place for kids to get
together.

TB: Did you go to any of the
assemblies at the college? Special speakers or any of that?

RB: Do not remember doing that.

TB: What grade level did you enter
public school? Why did you transfer and what was the
transition like for you?

RB: It would have been the fall of
1950, and it would have been that group that I went with to
Fairhaven. Transition was fine, piece of cake, not a
problem. The big difference for us would have been of course
that in the Campus School we had just one grade of everything, so, one
first grade, one second grade, etc. so the kids that I went to school
with were in my class each year. When we got to Fairhaven in
the eighth-grade, there were four sections: 8-1, 8-2, 8-3, and
8-4. In my homeroom section at Fairhaven there were probably
2 or 3 kids that went to the Campus School with me. But we
learned to get to know other people; it was not a problem at
all. The reason we went of course is that the Campus School
junior high school was phased out after that year.

TB: Please share any specific
differences between public school and Campus School that especially
affected you.

RB: I don’t think I was
especially affected. I’m sure if I knew what I know
now, I’d probably recognize more students, probably class
sizes were bigger, probably a less forgiving attitude. You
know, if you made a mistake in the Campus School they’d kind
of work with you. At Fairhaven, if you did something you
weren’t supposed to, there were consequences.
We’re talking back in the Fifties now, so it was a different
world in the public schools. I don’t remember
everything of course.

I
do remember when I was in the eighth-grade and it was basketball
season, a bunch of the ninth-grade kids, some of whom I still know
really well, decided that it would be fun if they and some of their
female friends spent a night on Chuckanut Mountain. We all
went up there at various times to hike and fish. There were a
lot of things to do up there. Well, they went up and camped
out. The short story is: they got kicked off the basketball
team, except for one, Jerry Punches, whose dad Frank was the
eighth-grade teacher. We happened to play Whatcom in the week
when these kids had been kicked off, so we had one regular starter and
the rest of us were eighth-graders. We lost that game 52 to
19. There were consequences for your actions,
there’s no question about that  that were different than
what we encountered at the Campus School.

You
talk about teachers that were influential, at the middle school level,
I had an eighth-grade social studies teacher and language teacher, his
name was Tommy Hewitson, and he was in charge of the school
paper. That’s when I really got hooked on
journalistic “stuff.” We wrote articles
and typed them, as part of a newspaper class/unit of study

That
goes back to the Campus School influence. In fact, I had a
couple of pictures; I could have brought one to you.
We’d learned keyboarding in elementary school. It
must have been at an early age, because the picture that I’ll
bring to our next session shows some of my classmates at
typewriters. They’ve got to be about third-grade
age I would guess. We learned on old royal typewriters the
same make of typewriter that was used at Bellingham High
School.

When
I took typing in high school, it was kind of like riding a bike,
thing’s came back to me quickly. I remember in my
class, I was a junior when I took typing, I was the fastest typer in
the class, even more so than a couple of the girls and I’m
sure that it was just the influence of having had previous
experience.

Then,
when I started principaling, my office had the same kind of a machine,
a Royal, so my fingers did pretty well. For years I typed my
own messages to the teachers, the secretary didn’t do it
until one time when I was at Roosevelt and the Kindergarten teacher
spied this ancient relic of a typewriter and said, “What
do you think? My Kindergarten kids would love to be able to
pound on that.” She took it, and then of
course, I relied on secretaries for the last part of my career, which
probably would have been about ten more years. Then when I
came up here following retirement from the public schools, computers
were the thing.

I resisted computers just as long
as I could, because I was more a face to face communicator.
In the schools I would go talk to the teachers and principals in
person. I finally had to succumb and get involved because
principals just don’t use their telephones. Their
means of communication, for most of them, is electronic. I
did it out of survival if nothing else.

The
point I’m trying to make is that I think the benefits we got
by having that early training at the Campus School; training that you
did not get in the public schools certainly paid dividends for me and
I’m sure others later on.

TB: Did you feel anything in the
grading system going from what was a narrative kind of grades to letter
grades? Did that affect you?

RB: I don’t think
so. I mean, I was not a four point student. I think
my high school grade point was a 2.83 but I got into the UW.
How things have changed. Now, people like me would say
it’s primarily due to grade inflation, you know, as I figure
my 2.83 was probably about a 3.83 or a 3.9 in this day and
age. So no, it probably wasn’t a factor.

I
know that one thing that I can tell you doesn’t have anything
to do with the Campus School. At Fairhaven they offered Latin
in the ninth-grade and so my mother decided that that would be the
thing to do, like when she thought taking violin lessons would be
something I would appreciate. So we took Latin as
ninth-graders and then we took our second year at the high
school. Well, most of the kids at the high school had taken
their first year at the high school, too, and they had a teacher who
knew something about Latin. At Fairhaven we really
didn’t get much background, so most of the Fairhaven kids
struggled mightily. I remember the last grading period I got
a D minus and the teacher said, “You know, I really
wanted to fail you,” but she
didn’t. When my mother looked at report cards, she
didn’t really care about the grade. In those days
they graded as well on effort and attitude. I
didn’t do well on those on that particular report
card. So I remember stopping at Pioneer Printing or Union
Printing on the way home, and got a little ink eradicator and I think I
changed the grade to a D plus and changed the effort and attitude, so
when I got home I survived what I knew was going to be a battle.

TB: And the school didn’t
notice that, didn’t they have to sign the report card?

RB: They already had. In
those days they gave you the report card and you took them home.

TB: And nobody had to take it back.

RB: No, no. They
don’t do that anymore. Now of course everything at
the high school level is mailed.

TB: What further education did you
pursue?

RB: When I finished at
Bellingham High School I went to the UW for two years, and my major at
the time was journalism. I took several journalism
courses. I can remember one of the instructors, he called all
of the students in to talk to him near the end of the course and he
said, “Well, you definitely could do this.
Are you prepared to have a career where you’re writing
obituaries?” Well, as I look back now,
there were a couple of us riding the fence about, “Do
we want to stay at the U? Do we want to go back home and go
to Western?” It was spring quarter and
the good weather was beckoning, a good friend had a place at Lake
Whatcom, ski boat, etc. That probably just tipped me over the
edge. In retrospect as I look back, I know what the professor
was doing, it was a test. What he was looking for was
somebody to say, “Not me. I’m
not going to be doing that because I’m going to get through
this program and I’m going to be out there and I’m
going to be the sports editor for the Sacramento whatever.”
But I didn’t do that. Still, journalism today is
still something that I really would enjoy.

TB: So you went to…

RB: I went to the U, and then I
transferred up here. It would have been spring quarter of
1957. The interesting thing about that is Donald Ferris was
the admissions director and his son had been a year behind me in school
as I recall, Billy Ferris. The winter quarter at the UW, just
before finals week, I got sick and couldn’t take my
finals. So I came up here to register and somebody was asking
me questions and they asked me about my winter quarter and I said,
“Well, I couldn’t do the finals, I have to
go back and take them during spring quarter.”
And she said, “Well, you can’t come up
here because you’re going to have sixteen credits here and
fifteen at the U, that’s 31 credits, you can’t do it.”
So, I called Mr. Ferris over and he said, “Hey,
he’s got the money. That’s his
problem. We don’t care. We’ll
take the money.” So what I had to do that
spring quarter was to on three different weekends go back, or three
different Fridays, go back to the UW and take my tests from the winter
quarter to finish up.

I
work now with these students who think they want to be elementary
school teachers and obviously most of them are female. I have
25 students this quarter and only one male (which is a sad commentary
from my perspective because I think we need more men at the elementary
level). And most of the girls knew twenty years ago or
fifteen years ago they wanted to teach Kindergarten or
first-grade. (I have a group that’s a little
different this quarter). I was not one of those who knew
forever and ever that I wanted to teach. I came in the
backdoor. I was up here and I thought, “Well,
you know, if I don’t go into education, I’m going
to have to do something else, go back to the U.”
So, I did it and it all worked out really well, but I was not one who
knew forever that that’s the career I was going to pursue.

TB: So you got your
bachelor’s degree from Western?

RB: Bachelor’s degree in
1959, December of 1959, master’s degree in 1966, in
educational administration.

TB: Since you did attend Western
and majored in education, did you observe or student teach in the
Campus School?

RB: No. In those days you
did two student teachings. My first student teaching was in
the third-grade at Franklin Elementary School, which for me was great
because I could walk from home. I didn’t have a car
in those days, so it was a great fit. Then the next quarter,
which would have been the fall quarter, I did my second student
teaching at Nooksack Valley Junior High School. So my
certificate when I finished qualified me to teach K through
12. Being a mid-year graduate of course there were not a lot
of jobs. I looked at the postings, there were a couple of
jobs open in Oak Harbor, so I applied and got one of those and started
then in January of 1960. The interview process in Oak Harbor
was interesting, but it had nothing to do with the Campus School, so
we’ll skip by that one.

TB: How did your attendance at the
Campus School influence your life and/or career?

RB: Well, I think as I look at
students that I went to school with and as I talk to these students
that came back to the reunion (of course a lot of them were not able
to), I think the underlying theme or message that would come through
was that all of these kids were successful in whatever they chose to
do. You know, be it business, or whatever. We all
look back and really realize what a great start we had. I
mean, everybody talks about the importance of those early years in
education and we definitely had a leg up on a lot of other people.

TB: Can you trace really what
exactly it was?

RB: I don’t
know. I think we all enjoyed school. I think that
we were a good group. I can’t remember anybody in
the group that was any kind of a problem at all. We had to be
a real easy group for teachers to work with. Our parents were
supportive, education was a valued thing. You had all the
things in place that provide school success. Interested,
supportive parents, great teachers, great environment in the school
setting, smaller class sizes, extra opportunities. We were
fortunate. We all know that. We recognize that.

TB: Going back a little bit, this
isn’t one of the questions exactly on here, but since you had
so many student teachers and yet you had the master teachers, how did
the master teacher really insert themselves into the process so that
you definitely had attachments to certain teachers, with so many
student teachers doing so much?

RB: Well, there was down time
between quarters, of course, when the student teachers
wouldn’t be there. I’m thinking about
student teachers that I’ve worked with. When they
first come to the classroom, the first week or so they’re not
doing much. They’re extra help or working with kids
one on one and doing these kinds of things, so the teacher’s
still going to retain a lot of control. I think initially
what they’re doing is they’re modeling instruction
for the student teachers that are there. I think student
teachers, as I think back, probably did not get to do as much teaching
as the student teachers do today. By that I mean, they did
units of study, as opposed to teaching all day long, maybe they taught
a part of the day. Whereas the students today, to be
certified, have to be responsible for everything, all the planning, all
the teaching, for a minimum of three weeks. And a lot of
them, depending on the teacher they’re working with, will do
four or five weeks. I don’t recall where the
student teachers really had control of the classroom for a long period
of time like that.

TB: Are you still in touch with any
Campus School classmates and if so, can you help us contact them?

RB: Well, going back to the reunion
that I was talking about, one of them, Pete Gaasland grew up one block
away from me. We were inseparable all the way through grade
school, and even into junior high school up until about maybe eighth or
ninth-grade. In high school, we drifted apart a little bit,
same thing in college and then when we went our separate ways when out
there in the real world. I didn’t see him for a
long, long time. But we’ve kind of grown back
together. We do a lot of things together; we traveled to
Scandinavia together for three weeks here a couple of years
ago. So, the friendship has been rekindled. He
would be the closest one. There are a few that still live
around town that I see, but I don’t really mix with them
socially. But, at the reunion seeing these fourteen kids (and
there are a few that I will see on occasions that are not reunions),
they’re all doing well.

TB: Do you have campus memorabilia,
photographs, class publications, crafts, art work, etc.? And
may we contact you about these items

RB: Well, I don’t have
any art work or things like that. You know, maybe, my
daughter might have some stuff. I can ask her about
that. What I do have is an annual from junior high
school. It was the only one the junior high school ever did,
and the title of it was, Alpha-Omega,
meaning first and last. And this, in fact, was a picture from
it, of our seventh-grade classroom. You can have that as
I’ve got extra copies. Carole Morris has that book
right now. I’m sure there are other people in
Bellingham that still have it. The only thing I’ve
got left is that and my lunch pail.

TB: All right, but you do have your
lunch pail?

RB: I do have my lunch pail.

TB: So possibly we could borrow
that for the exhibit?

RB: Sure. I
don’t have the thermos. I remember the
thermos. It was blue with red circular stripes at the top of
it, maybe three or four of them. But it’s long gone.

TB: Please share with us any
favorite memories of your Campus School days and any comments about
areas not covered by the questionnaire above.

RB: Well, yes, any special
memories. I remember coming to school during the war
years. You’d come in the main entrance and they
would be selling war bonds. We bought stamps to support the
World War II effort. Green stamps, as I recall, were the most
expensive and the prized ones. They’d sell purple
stamps that were less expensive. But that was one of the
things that I remember vividly.

I
remember the Jersey Street Trail experience all the time, coming across
that trail, particularly on our bikes. I can remember a time
and I think I was in sixth or seventh-grade when a student who was a
year or two older shared that as she crossed the Jersey Street Trail
(because she lived down, close to where KVOS is now on Ellis Street),
she had been attacked or followed or stalked by some male. So
the word was out. For a long time they wouldn’t let us use
that trail, we had to walk down Indian Street, and then climb up a
steep path to Myrtle Street, and we didn’t like
that. But that blew over; there was no big deal about
anything like that again.

I
remember in first grade that Mary Jane  we were having a birthday
party  I think it was Gary Wagner’s birthday.
There were cupcakes with one candle and they lit the candles.
Mary Jane Sefrit (who came to the reunion, she lives in Florida now)
had long hair. She turned around to talk to somebody and her
hair caught on fire. We all remember that and we all kid her
about it. Somebody got there, put it out immediately, but of
course we remember that experience like it happened
yesterday.

Dr.
Haggard, who was the president of the college at that time, and the
grass was his domain. You don’t walk on the
grass. So I’m in sixth or seventh-grade,
I’m not sure which. So this buddy and I, ride our
bikes across the Jersey Street Trail and down the walkway in front of
Old Main. We must have been at the Campus School, not the
junior high school. Down the sidewalk that has all the
college memorabilia from the various years, then we’d cut
across to our school from there. One time we had our bikes up
at the top of the hill right by Old Main. We rode our bikes
down the hill out onto the grass, the big expansive grass that is still
there. Somebody saw us and turned us in and so Pete and I had
an audience with Dr. Haggard about why we don’t ride our
bikes on the grass.

It’s
kind of interesting, you drive around now and you see all the
maintenance people. In those days, Mr. George A. Dack was the
lead grounds man and his helper was a guy by the name of Pete Lundstrom
who had a wooden leg. Two of them maintained all of the
grounds.

TB: Wow.

RB: Interesting.

TB: Yes. Anything else I
haven’t asked you right now that you’d like to
comment on?

RB: What I did Tamara, in
preparing for this was look at the first six things. If I
look at the others I’m sure there’re going to be
some things that will jog my memory, so if you’re O.K. with
it we could do another session some time.

TB: Sure, yes, excellent.

RB: So maybe we cut this one off at
this point and time and I’ll look at that material and then
I’ll call you Monday and we’ll set up a time.

TB: Perfect, O.K., thank you very
much.

Session Two –
October 17, 2005 -- Tape 2

TB: Today is Monday, October 17th,
2005, and I’m here again with Rob Brand and we’re
going to continue our oral history. Some of the questions
will be repeated, but he hadn’t really thought about them all
before, so we’ll see if that changes some of this.
Who were your favorite or most influential teachers?

RB: Well, I remember, like
everybody does, Miss Kinsman who we had in third-grade.
I think the thing that I remember about that is spelling.
We did a trial test and a final test. Then we
graphed it throughout the year, so I know the Wednesday, or trial test,
was graphed in blue and the final test was graphed in red. I
remember that during the year I missed one word. I remember
the word, it was uncle. I’m not sure how I spelled
it, but what she was doing was integrating curriculum. It was
not just spelling; it was learning how to do bar graphs and other
things not directly related to spelling. We work with our
student teachers now, to integrate curriculum and interrelate things,
much as Miss Kinsman did back in 1946.

It’s
interesting, the fifth-grade teacher [Mrs. Gregory], I still
can’t come up with her name. I was going to call
somebody and ask them, so that one really escapes me, but I know that I
mentioned Miss McLeod because she was my sixth-grade teacher and
that’s where my interest in journalistic endeavors really had
a chance to be sparked and flourish. That’s where
it all started. Pete and I did a class newspaper and so that
was a special person at that time.

Miss
Hunt was the seventh-grade teacher. We all remember Miss
Hunt. She was old school, like Miss Elliot, the second-grade
teacher. She was strict. But, that was
O.K. The seventh grade class was a large one in terms of
student enrollment, and probably required more structure.

In
thinking back, I mentioned that we played all the sports. The
head coach at one time was Pinky Erickson. (Jerry Punches,
I’ll give you his name too, was a year ahead of me, and
didn’t go to the Campus School all the time, but his dad was
the eighth grade teacher, Frank Punches). Well, Jerry and I
were talking, maybe at the reunion, and he said, “Remember
when Pinky Erickson was called away from one of our turnouts?”
And I said, “Well, probably not.”
And he said, “Well, it’s because his wife
was having a baby and the baby was Dennis Erickson.”
He later became the coach of the Seahawks. He also coached at
Washington State, Miami, Oregon State, and he coached the San Francisco
49ers up until a year ago. I would have been in grade seven
at the time. So, that’s one that I did not
remember, but Jerry Punches did.

TB: Oh, wow! O.K., do you
remember any of your student teachers?

RB: Well, the one I remember
specifically was Stew Van Wingerden. I think that was in
fifth-grade, so maybe I remember him more than I remember the
teacher. And then of course, I’ve known Stewart
ever since then because he supervised student teachers when I was
principal at Roosevelt grade school, and then we were colleagues at
Woodring when I came up here to work part time. I see Stewart
periodically. His daughter, ironically enough, is a teacher
in the Nooksack district at Everson Elementary School. I had
students there in the mid-Nineties but I never had a student working
with her because at the time she was a reading specialist.
She is now a classroom teacher at that school.

I
mentioned the two student teachers that my sister had, so
we’ll kind of skip over that one. But I do
remember, this would have been a student teacher, his name was Jim
Beasley and he helped us with the various sports programs that we
had. We played all the sports, so anybody who did anything to
help us in sports, that was a plus.

I
remember basketball. I think I told you about the gym that
was down in the basement of Old Main that had a very low
ceiling. You couldn’t shoot a regular shot; you had
to have a different arch on it, one that had to be flattened out.

When
I was in seventh-grade we won one basketball game. We beat
Custer Elementary School. I don’t know what the
score was. My cousin was teaching and coaching at Custer at
the time and that would have been 1950. The last two winters,
I’ve had practicum students at Custer and the gym is still
the same one that they used back then. The school out there
has been added onto any number of times but the gym is the gym that we
played in in 1950. The Custer school is scheduled for a major
remodel in 2008.

I
don’t know why I didn’t come up with this before;
you have to understand that the Campus School had a small population to
draw from, so athletically we could not compete with Fairhaven and
Whatcom. We played schools out in the county. We
won one baseball game and of course the thing I remember from the
baseball game is that Jim Mace was pitching for Mount Baker and we had
a man on third base, Jerry Larson, and I got a base hit to center field
that won the game. Only game we won, I got carried off the
field. The next week we played Lynden and I made three errors
in one inning. I remember Robbie Calhoun had to come in and
take my place. That was going from the ultimate high to the
ultimate low in a matter of seven days. That was interesting,
but sports were just, our life, that’s the main thing we did;
and the academics kind of were secondary to those kinds of things.

I
do remember
another teacher, I jotted it down and I’ll mention this, and
not
one that was necessarily influential. Her name was Miss Gragg
and
Miss Gragg was a handwriting specialist. So at the Campus
School
we had a handwriting specialist and I can remember she came to the
classroom and I can remember doing circle-“o”,
circle-“o”, circle-“o”, half
circle-“c”, half circle-“c”,
etc. The
irony of it all is that if I looked back at my handwriting in junior or
senior high school, it was like chicken scratch. I mean,
whatever
she was teaching just didn’t take for me. And my
handwriting didn’t really improve until I was out
principaling
and had to write a lot of notes and memos when I was supervising
student teachers. It was certainly not the style that she
taught
us, but I developed, I guess, like most of us, my own particular
style.

Miss
Gragg, I’m not sure, I had in the back of my mind, that she
was related to the Haggard family.

RB: Gragg Miller, that’s
what I wondered. I thought the connection has to be that
Gragg Miller was named after our old handwriting teacher.

TB: Well, the other question
is, did she not teach you printing? I’ve heard
people say you learned to print, not handwrite.

RB: Oh, she must have, because when
I started teaching in 1960 in Oak Harbor, I taught fourth-grade where
the children were expected to use cursive. My cursive was so
bad that I had to write in manuscript on the board. I
couldn’t write in cursive because it was so bad. So
I’m sure we spent a lot of time on printing.

TB: What were your favorite
subjects or classroom activities?

RB: I liked them all in elementary
school. I liked arithmetic. It was not until I got
to high school and we had to do mathematics that my interest
waned I was probably more a literacy, social
studies person than a math/science kind of a person.

I
think I mentioned last week, that my father, by trade, was a
carpenter. He lost the sight of one eye, so he had to give it
up, because the eye-hand coordination made it difficult to hit the
nails instead of your thumb. So he had to change professions,
or change jobs. The carpentry gene pool did not trickle down.
The worst grades that I got at Fairhaven were in woodshop and metal
shop. And to this day, at our house, if it has moving parts
my wife does the repair work. My job would be to call the
plumber and say, “Come over here, we have a problem.”
But she can get in and fix it -- didn’t work for me.

TB: Any other thoughts about the
textbooks or the learning materials that you might have used?

RB: You know, I don’t
remember much about the textbooks. I do remember the reading,
because we did the Dick and Jane series which came under a lot of fire
later on. What I remember about reading is doing a lot of
round robin reading. Are you familiar with what round robin
reading is? We discourage the students we work with now from
doing it. It would be like a group reading and you had x
number of kids in the group and one would read, then another would
read, another, etc. In the group all you had to do was
remember who you followed and then you had to pay attention when they
were reading so you would know where to pick up when it was your
turn. It’s a system that is no longer taught, but
we did that a lot. For those of us that learned to read, that
was fun. It was not a problem.

The
question that I ask students a lot is “Do you
remember how you learned to read?” This
one came from my wife who was a reading specialist before becoming a
principal. Most of us who learned to read without much
difficulty don’t remember how we learned to read.
If you talked to kids who struggled and maybe were special education
students, they will remember all they had to do in terms of
“B-ball” and similar tasks. So, you know
I don’t really remember and I don’t remember if we
had a book for spelling or if we had books for math, social studies and
other subjects.

TB: Any other thoughts
about the grading system?

RB: Well, probably as students we
didn’t pay too much attention to it. I know it was
never anything that as a student I worried about. You know,
it was not like the WASL pressures that kids are under now. I
knew I was always going to go to the next grade and if there were
issues or problems I was never aware of them going through the Campus
School.

TB: Anything more about the
creative activities you might have done, the weaving, making things?

RB: I guess I don’t
remember as much about that. Usually kids can look back and
remember. Even when my son was in middle school at Shuksan,
they made things in shop that came home, and we still have them
around. Whatever they were, I don’t remember making
anything that remained a family heirloom, if you will. What I
remember, from a creative standpoint, is more the creative writing in
terms of newspaper kinds of things as mentioned earlier. It
was not something that was specifically taught. It was more
something that was encouraged and we did more of it pretty much on our
own as opposed to something that was a specific class time that was set
aside.

TB: Right. So did you
start a newspaper then…

RB: We did one in
sixth-grade. But it mostly had to do with sports things that
happened outside of school, as opposed to writing about what was going
on in the Campus School.

TB: What were your thoughts about
what the class was like with student teachers observing and/or teaching
lessons or parts of lessons? Any thoughts on that?

RB: No, as I look back, I know the
expectation on student teachers in those days was not like it is for
student teachers now. When they go out today, they have to do
at least three weeks of full time teaching, where they do all the
planning and all the teaching for three weeks. It could be
longer, some will do four weeks, or five weeks. It will
depend on the teacher, the supervisor, the student, etc.

I
don’t remember them taking over like that. What I
remember about them is their being responsible for a unit of study in
science, in social studies, doing plays, things like that, things that
our regular classroom teacher probably would not have the time to
do. From the classroom teacher’s standpoint, it was
a real plus.

I
know the Campus School and its focus changed after we were
gone. I think when we were there probably what was happening
instructionally was not a great deal different than what
you’d find in the public schools. I think the basic
difference would have been the number of adults you had, a smaller
class size, a lot of extra things that you could not provide in the
public schools at that time. Later on they got into things
like foreign language and other things that were just not a part of
what we experienced when we went through the program.

TB: Anything more about the
extra-curricular activities, recess, lunch time, games that you played?

RB: Well, I mentioned the sports
stuff, which I say was absolutely critical. I think that a
typical day, when we got finished we’d play either on the
grounds or we’d go over and watch the football team turn out
or watch the students playing track and things like that.
We’d come up on weekends and do our own track meets on the
track. Those were the days when we didn’t have
programs in the community like they do today. So when kids
did something it was, “Let’s meet
somewhere and divide up” and we’d play
work up or have teams if we had enough people to do that. But
we were not dependent on a coach being there and somebody blowing a
whistle and saying “Now, this is what
we’re going to do.” It just
didn’t occur.

I
can’t remember the grade, Pete Gaasland probably would
remember. We would have been in fourth or
fifth-grade. It was the first year that Bellingham had a
summer baseball program. Frank Geri, who was an institution
at Whatcom Middle School for years; he was the boys’ P.E.
teacher (and my aunt was the girls’ P.E. teacher.
She later taught math). Well, Frank started a summer baseball
program and the first year, kids were not age divided. So as
fourth or fifth-graders, and I’m not sure exactly which, we
played on a team that had high school and junior high school kids
too. You can imagine the success we enjoyed when we were at
bat against somebody throwing real hard. None. I
don’t think I got a base hit the whole year.

Which
reminds me of a story, when we were on the baseball team we played out
at Nooksack Valley. Now, remember, I’m a
seventh-grader, so my bat was almost as big as I was and we played
against a pitcher, Bob Reimer, who has since passed away. He
later, went to the UW and pitched for them. He got a
scholarship to the University of Washington. He threw
hard. I was the first batter up and I walked on four pitches
and I don’t think I saw one of them as they just went by
me. The next two guys went out and so I got the sign to try
to steal second base. The second baseman was Pete
Gaasland’s cousin who lived in Sumas. I took off
and he had the ball waiting for me and said, “Don’t
bother to slide, Butch,” (Butch was my nickname at
the time). I mean, I was out by twenty feet. But
the interesting thing about that game is we didn’t get a
hit. Not just me, nobody got a hit. And by the
fourth inning I would say, the only Nooksack players that were on their
feet were the pitcher and the catcher and the first baseman.
Everybody else, the outfielders were lying down, the third baseman was
sitting on the bag. They knew this guy was so good that we
weren’t even going to touch him. And we
didn’t. So it’s funny how those things
kind of stick in your memory bank.

TB: That’s
right. Any other thoughts about your interactions with the
college itself?

RB: You asked that question before
and I tried to think about that one and I don’t
remember. I don’t remember doing things with
performing arts, those kinds of programs. Like we mentioned,
we supported them in the sports programs, particularly basketball and
football. The only tricky thing about coming to the
basketball games at night was on the way home we had to go across the
Jersey Street Trail when it was pitch black.

I
can remember one time when I was by myself. I started from
this end by Edens Hall and I got up on the flat part of the trail, I
could see a cigarette coming toward me. I knew somebody was
going to be on the trail with me, probably about the middle of the
trail, which was a part where there used to be an old motorcycle climb
that they used (they came off Indian Street and would try to see how
far the motorcycles could get up the trail). So I worried all
the time; who was this, was it going to be a problem. When we
got side by side, I just took off and ran as fast as I could.
It was not a problem, but it made you think a little bit when it was
ten o’clock at night in that kind of a setting. The
safest way would have been go down High Street or Indian Street, where
there were street lights.

TB: Were the kids really supposed
to be on those trails in the woods?

RB: Well, we grew up on the
other side of Sehome Hill, so we were up there all the time.
I mean, we camped out on Sehome Hill. We went up there and
did all kinds of things. So for us, it was just kind of an
extension of our back yard. But I mentioned to you about the
girl, who some male advanced on to some degree. It was
nothing that was overly serious, but it got everybody’s
attention and for a time they said we couldn’t use the Jersey
Street Trail going to and from school. That lasted for maybe
a couple of weeks and then everything was fine and they changed
back. That was the only time. Other than that, I
mean, that was just common stuff for the neighbors that lived on
Liberty, Key, Jersey, Mason, and MyrtleStreet.
That was our transportation mode.

TB: Any other thoughts about when
you transferred to public school, after eighth or ninth-grade?

RB: Seventh-grade for me.
I left after seventh-grade because they closed the junior high school
in June of 1950.

TB: O.K.

RB: The Korean War veterans [were]
coming back and they needed the space. The junior high school
was not a part of what is now Miller Hall. It was in Old
Main. And there were three classrooms. One room set
aside, as I mentioned was kind of a social gathering spot.
They called it the canteen. You could buy pencils, paper, and
those kinds of things. That’s where student government met
and did their thing there.

Student
government was kind of interesting. I know that in the
seventh grade I ran for treasurer. Interesting they would
have a seventh-grader be the treasurer and I think for some years after
that we still had five dollars in the bank. I don’t
think I closed out the account. I ran for treasurer against
my best friend, Pete Gaasland, and I was elected.
I’m sure the reason was that I had an older sister in
ninth-grade so I probably got some of the ninth-grade votes that he
wouldn’t get, simply because of that.

What
I remember is the campaign speech that I gave. Not every part
of it. It was not an original. My aunt, who taught
at Whatcom, had seen somebody do that speech at Whatcom. What
is was was you go through the word
“treasurer.” So, you know, O.K,
“T,” I will be trustworthy,
“R,” I will be responsible,
“E,” I will be earnest, “A,” I
will be accurate. I might be able to resurrect the whole
thing, but that was the campaign speech and I was elected. We
did student government and did some of those kinds of things.
There was a student council and I don’t know how much say we
had about what happened or what didn’t happen, but it was an
attempt, I think, to get us somewhat involved.

Then
as I was reading through, I think I left you the picture, the picture,
of the seventh-grade class. Did I leave you a picture of the
seventh grade class?

TB: No.

RB: O.K., we’ll talk
about that. But I noticed in that picture, that’s a
part of the Alpha- Omega annual
that I have, we also had officers, each of three quarters, in the
class. So our individual classroom had officers for all
winter and spring and I’m sure the eighth and ninth-grade
kids did, too. So I think it was obviously an attempt to get
us introduced at some level to government and how it worked.

TB: So any other thoughts about
what the transition was like from Campus School to the junior high?

RB: It was not a problem for me and
not a problem for those people that were close friends of mine
either. I did have a cousin, distant, very distant cousin,
who would have been a ninth-grader at Fairhaven when I was an
eighth-grader. I think he kind of got the word out.
You know, we had heard all the horror stories; they’re going
to stuff you in the garbage can. The same thing goes on now
when the kids leave Happy Valley or Larrabee or Lowell, they hear the
stories about getting your head stuck in the toilets or stuck in a
garbage can. It truly doesn’t happen.
There was no hazing that took place for us that I can recall.

TB: And then getting grades,
suddenly getting grades after…?

RB: I suppose that was different,
but again, school for me at least, at that stage of my career, was not
an issue. I never had to worry about what kind of grade I was
going to get.

TB: Well, any
other comments then about the education that you further pursued,
because you went to Western and got your bachelor’s degree in
education, right?

RB: Correct.

TB: Any other thoughts about that
and the influence the Campus School had on you. For example,
did Campus School influence your going into education as a teacher?

RB: No. In fact, when I got out of
Bellingham High School in 1955, the goal for most of the kids was not
to go to Western. Bellingham High School, from a population
standpoint was probably almost as big as Western was at that particular
time. It’s a beautiful campus. People
that grow up somewhere else and come up here and some of these kids
live in these dorms that overlook Bellingham Bay; that’s
going to be the best housing they have as long as they live.
But for us that grew up here, it was not the thing to do.

I
was going to go to Washington State for ever and ever. Peer
pressure, a lot of my buddies were going to the U, we were being
rushed, and several of us joined the Sigma Nu Fraternity. So,
we were there, kind of as a group, kind of did our thing. I
stayed there for a couple of years and then came to Western, but even
when I came to Western, it was not with the idea of becoming a
teacher. I was not one of those who knew in Kindergarten that
I was going to be a Kindergarten teacher. I get students like
that: “I’ve known since I was in
Kindergarten with Mrs. Jones that I was going to be a Kindergarten
teacher.” I’m one of those who
can prove that you can come in the back door as an educator and find
your niche and be successful. I came in the back door and
found that yes, this indeed was a calling for me and today
I’ve been doing it for 46 years. So, it must have
been a fit somehow.

TB: Yes. So how did
attendance at the Campus School influence your life?

RB: I don’t know about
that. I think that as Campus School students we were privy to
a lot of things that kids in the public schools didn’t
get. I think the expectation pretty much for most of us was:
Campus School, high school, college. I think that was just
kind of an unwritten credo that we all subscribed to. It
would be interesting. I talked about the reunion and the
number of kids from the Campus School that were there, seventeen, which
is pretty good, and fourteen of them at the school since
Kindergarten. But what I don’t know is how many of
those kids went to college, how many finished college, what they were
doing later on. It would have been an interesting thing to
try to find out.

TB: Have we totally gone over what
kind of Campus School memorabilia you might have, including
photographs, class publications, crafts, artwork that we…?

RB: I have a few
photographs. If I could come up with some I will share them
with you. Carole has the annual, but I’m sure a lot
of folks still have the annual. That’s probably
about all that I have left. I looked for ever for my
basketball jersey, because we all got to take them with us at the
time. It used to be on a panda bear that I’d had
when I was young, but it’s gone, gone forever. I do
remember we talked about the crafts, the woodshop, the typing, and
those extra things.

I
do remember in seventh-grade we had cooking class in Old Main, down in
the basement of Old Main at the far end, and the instructor was Miss
Countryman.

Her
[nephew] Keith Countryman was in my class and her [niece], Sidney
Countryman was in my sister’s class. Now, the
interesting thing about the Countryman family is that when we were in
sixth-grade, we had School [Crossing-Guard Patrol], just like the
public schools did. The crosswalks that we covered were High
Street, where the bookstore is now and then straight down below on
Garden Street where all those streets now come together.
School patrol was a big thing, you wanted to be captain or lieutenant
and I’m sure I was at some point in time along the
way. But the public school kids, the trade off, or the carrot
that they looked forward to at the end of the year was going to Birch
Bay to the amusement park to ride the rides. Our parents at
the Campus School were not just going to do what everybody else
did. So we went to Orcas Island to Cascade Lake in Moran
State Park.

The
interesting thing is how we got there. We got there on the Osage,
which was a mail boat that plied the waters from Bellingham and
delivered mail out to the islands. The owner and captain of
the Osage was Keith
Countryman’s father. I don’t know if you
get the Bellingham Herald.
Do you get the Bellingham Herald?
There was a picture in there probably about two weeks ago, (I should
have cut it out and didn’t). It showed the Osage,
and what it said is that they lost the mail contract in 1950.
That would have been the year that the Campus School junior high school
closed down. So, when Keith and the rest of us went to
Fairhaven, that’s when his dad lost the mail
contract. I think it said he continued to carry cargo for a
time, but not for a long time. That’s about the
time when that type of mail delivery or cargo delivery was being taken
over by other, more efficient means. So that was a very
special ending to our sixth grade year.

I
remember the end of our seventh-grade year, too, because of course,
that was the end. That was the end of the Campus
School. Our entire seventh-grade classroom went to Pete
Gaasland’s summer place at Lake Whatcom. Do you
know where The Firs is located now? Well, The Firs bought
that property from Glen Corning, who had all the property around Lake
Louise. I think he had about 35 acres, maybe more than
that. If you went south down the island toward blue canyon,
the next piece of property was owned by Pete Gaasland’s dad
-- beautiful property, white sandy beach, just a great spot.
So we all went out there the last day of school. The whole
class; the mothers did a huge buffet luncheon or dinner. That
was kind of a special ending for our class, even though we
didn’t really split up. Our class, the whole bunch
of us, went to Fairhaven the next year. So we still saw
everybody and were in some of the same rooms. But obviously,
compared to the Campus School, Fairhaven was about four times
bigger.

TB: Any other favorite memories or
comments that you haven’t talked about?

RB: It’s
interesting. I called my sister to see. I said, “I
know you’re not going to fill out the survey.”
(I think she’s on the reunion committee, that’s
what Carole told me, I don’t know). I said,
“Just send me a couple of memories, if you can think
of any.” What she remembered was buying
the savings bonds, the war bonds, like we all did.

TB: During World War II.

RB: Yes, and she remembers the
smell of the rubber ramps. Like I told you, if students come
back now, the only thing they’re going to see that
they’ll remember are going to be the ramps, because
they’ve chopped up all the classrooms into small
spaces. I didn’t notice the smell of them, so I
thought that was kind of interesting.

TB: The woman I did
yesterday talked about the smell of campus

RB: Did she?

TB: Yes. Well, anything
else? That’s all of our questions.

RB: One other thing that
I’ve got down, two other things. And one of them
fits with “how you got to school and
back.” As I told you, Pete and I rode our bikes
across the Jersey Street Trail, now this is an interesting
one. So, at both ends of the trail, it drops down, so at the
other end of the Jersey Street Trail, when you come down the trail,
like this, it makes a bend and Jersey Street is below.

Well,
our bikes were really very interesting. Pete had a Pioneer
bike, a blue Pioneer bike. I had a silver and black Hawthorn
that my folks bought out in Blaine for five dollars. Now, you
have to understand, this is wartime. We were lucky to even
have bikes. To this day I remember, I saved and saved and
saved so I could buy a new bike, I paid a hundred dollars for it and it
was not nearly as good as that old Hawthorn bike that I had.
Pete could only work the brakes if his right foot were in the back
position – on this one occasion his feet were reversed, he
could not slow down, missed the curve and went airborne, landing in a
heap below on Myrtle St. The good news? Both Pete and the
bike were O.K.!